Are you as fed up as I am with left wing parties and many in the media constantly running down our past? They demand apologies for historical bad conduct only from Britain. They rightly  condemn slavery but do not insist on statute removal of Roman artefacts, a society based on violent conquest, slavery and an army of occupation. They ignore the U.K. role in ending the slave trade.  So here to provide balance and perspective are 10 things to be proud of in U.K. history.
1. Great Britain has pioneered many crucial technological advances that have raised world living standards. There was the steam engine, factory organisation, the jet engine, vaccines and many great products from the Industrial revolution  to the worldwide web.
2. The U.K. pioneered universal suffrage and democratic government through the Glorious Revolution to the great Reform Bill and votes for women.
3. The U.K. stood alone against Germanyâs attempt to govern Europe with an army of conquest, later joining with the USA and USSR to end the tyranny and genocide.
4. The U.K. has made a huge cultural contribution to the world. Shakespeare is the worldâs greatest dramatist. His plays are acted and filmed worldwide today because they capture eternal truths about mankind.
5. The U.K. pioneered relief of poverty from the provision of money under the early Poor laws by parishes through to the post 1945 comprehensive pension and benefits system.
6. The U.K.  has stood up for the self determination of peoples  and rescued smaller countries from invasion and aggression by violent neighbours. The U.K. sided with the Netherlands against Spanish occupation, defeated Napoleonâs efforts to invade  many European countries and helped liberate Kuwait.
7. The U.K. has been a leading force for free trade worldwide.
8. The U.K. invented or developed football, cricket, rugby and lawn tennis as global sports, bringing much entertainment to a world in need of joy.
9. The U.K. developed modern farming techniques from selective breeding to higher yielding crops to help eliminate starvation. .The U.K. has a big Aid programme helping bring improved agriculture to hungry countries.
10. Great Britain founded the east coast settlements in North America that fathered the USA, the most powerful and innovative nation on earth. The drivers of US independence based their thoughts and actions on Great Britainâs political theories and structures.
September 9, 2024
Wholly concur. You have but scratched the surface of course. The generosity, humility, courage and fortitude of our people through the generations are to admire for all time. They are cause for hope, because all of those inherited qualities need to be displayed in abundance to recover ourselves from the current mess in which we find ourselves. We are in a mess because we have not cherished our inheritance.
We need to conduct ourselves in such a way that our forefathers would be proud of us. We need to stick up for everything good and just and not be cowed.
I canât remember which sportsman it was who said âalways remember that you are British and do nothing to tarnish that heritageâ. Wise man. Faldo maybe.
September 9, 2024
You’re wasting your time with the raving leftwaffe being incharge of government and all the institutions.
Showing the Union flag is now deemed faaaar rite by our leaders who are thoroughly ashamed of us.
Fingers crossed for Trump.
September 9, 2024
We used to put a Union flag up on Remembrance Sunday and for St George’s day, but now, we leave it up all year! It flutters proudly on the front corner of our house!
We love our country…despite all the cultural attacks on it. Does that make us far right? I guess so!
September 9, 2024
On a recent break on Hayling Island – we noticed quite a number of Union flags!
September 9, 2024
Your viewpoint is astonishingly one sided to the point of naivety. This is the country of feudalism and serfdom. The birthplace of an industrial revolution that sent millions from poverty in the countryside to worse poverty in slums and hovels in our cities. A country with a history of a tyrannical monarchy. Let us not forget the building of empire – so often airbrushed as a gift to the uneducated natives of the countries we occupied by force. The reality was tyranny, slavery and the black hole of Calcutta. Letâs have some balance.
September 9, 2024
Of course our country has been involved in many wrongs. But for balance haven’t we accepted those wrongs and worked with those affected to try to produce positives.
September 10, 2024
The feudalism and serfdom were imposed on England by the Normans and were progressively thrown off. The Industrial Revolution led to a step change in wealth which progressively spread through the population driven by increasing democracy after the reforms of the franchise. India was a chaos of warring fiefdoms until unified and pacified by the empire to deliver a century of peace. Our tyrannical monarchy was progressively tamed by democracy and reduced to being a figurehead.
Since Blair however some of these huge gains have been reversed as parliament has been weakened and power given to technocrats.
September 11, 2024
Feudalism/Serfdom was widespread across Europe in the Middle Ages which only altered here after the Plague. It’s a system that was based around a Lord providing defence to the local population paying a tax or tithe. It is believed to have originated in the Frankish kingdom in the 9th century.
People moved from the countryside to the cities to work for extra wages, because they wanted to.
Slavery and monarchy was also widespread around the world in antiquity, arguably the worst aspects coming from the Middle East, where tyrants castrated male slaves. Britain was the first country to abolish slavery in the early 1800’s at a cost of 2% of the national budget (the entire defence spend).
September 11, 2024
It’s also worth bearing in mind, that all those downtrodden countries in the noose of the British Empire chose to voluntarily join the Commonwealth afterwards.
September 9, 2024
@Lynn Atkinson – your thinking while it chimes with the UK’s mainstream it is completely at odds with that place called the House of Commons and its members
September 9, 2024
They are specifically chosen for that purpose.
September 9, 2024
Good morning.
If this was, and is a bad country, why do so many, both legally and illegally wish to come here ?
Yes, I know some come for the benefits, but for those that don’t.
September 9, 2024
The weather perhaps?
The UK is still a better place to be than very many other places, but for how much longer? We have had, essentially evil, tax to death socialism since Major replaced Thatcher and even Thatcher failed in very many ways to cut the state back (even appointing the idiotic John Major and letting him join the appalling ERM and to destroy the Tory party.
September 9, 2024
Tolerance above all else. Hardly any extremes – perhaps the worst is the nonsense often portrayed in the Houses of Westminster.
September 9, 2024
Who is saying this is a bad country to live in? As you point out millions, billions even, would love to live here. A temperate climate, clean water coming out of a tap in every house, electricity available at the flock of a switch, a national health service, a veneer of democracy, the opportunity to better oneself, education for children ⊠this is a far bettor place to live than many places.
September 9, 2024
The English language? Certainly less complicated to survive with it than with most continental European languages
(to keep with those using the Latin alphabet), those with tricky conjugations, declensions, spelling changing with the gender or type of complements, ⊠Furthermore English has incorporated enough Germanic and Roman vocabularies to allow several synonyms to describe the same concept, a bonus for an English-speaking debutant possibly cognisant in one of those.
The weekly column by the sociolinguist Peter Trudgill is an eye-opener in these matters.
September 9, 2024
I thoroughly recommend Nigel Biggar’s, ‘Colonialism – A Moral Reckoning’.
His exhaustive research and analysis shows that the anti-Colonialists view of an exploitative and racist history of Britain is simply untrue because it is not supported by the facts. It is a judgment that does not follow from the facts but precedes the facts. He says, ‘It is, precisely, an anti-colonialist pre-judgment – a prejudice.’
A timely reminder of this is BBC Commentator Katie Derham’s commentary on Rule, Britannia! being performed at the Proms, calling it ‘incredibly problematic’.
People like Katie Derham are just plain ignorant. The phrase, ‘Rule, Britannia’ is not a celebration of supremacy at all. It is a plea to Britannia as the female and therefore more virtuous personification of Britain to rule the waves and protect it from invasion. Rule is in the subjunctive mood but she probably doesn’t even know what that is.
As always and as every Marxist knows, the answer, or at least the greater part of it, lies in education, not an area in which the UK state excels.
September 9, 2024
+++
Basically the song was a poem set to music for a Masque. It is an exhortation to the failing navy to rule the seas.
âRule, Britannia!â Is Imperative (!)
The suggestion of subjunctive comes later with some dispute over âshouldâ orâwouldâ ( be slaves).
AnywayâŠwhat a load of utter rubbish. Diversions and time wasting.
An old poemâŠchanged over timeâŠmeaning too. Once it became âMarr i ed to a mer mai ed at the bottom of the deep blue seaâ.
Maybe thatâs what they should sing at the Proms?
I havenât attempted to watch them for years now.
September 9, 2024
Oh the IK State has excelled in both education and media control and corruption. Both are required to destroy truth and a people. âWe will make your children hate youâ – remember the threat?
Always look at the actions and then conclude what objective might be.
September 9, 2024
Indeed & would any other local rulers or other colonisers Dutch, French, Spanish… have been preferable – who can say?
September 9, 2024
You could add:
* Parlimentary democracy
* a system of courts for interpretation and enforcement of the law
* private ownership
* stock markets
September 9, 2024
âprivate ownershipâ this now hugely under threat from proposed and past attacks on landlords, wealth taxes, inheritance tax taxes like CGT without indexation and osborneâs appalling double taxation of landlord interest. âParlimentary democracyâ democracy? a vote every five years for under FPTP the least bad of two or three candidates (with any chance). When the candidate are generally blatant and serial liars who will not even try to do as they promised. Read the last few Tory Manifestos and the Labour one.
If you are allowed to replace the dishonest and lying driver of a bus once every five years and replace him with a very similar new dishonest liar are you really driving the bus or remotely choosing the destination?
The UK legal system is vastly expensive, very slow, delivering two tiered and largely no deterrent justice and now hugely political too.
September 9, 2024
Starmer and the left claim they support people who ‘work hard, play by all the rules. ‘ It follows that those people paid all their taxes, created growth in the UK economy, and often without that university education these academic rulers believe makes them superior (especially STEM grad hey Lifelogic).
They protect their pensions, while Brown previously with his pension raid, and now Starmer threatens more to ruin the retirement planning of the private sector. Then, they don’t want you to pass on your taxed wealth after years of sacrifice, not only by you but also by your children; they want to simply ‘grab it’, a wealth tax is popular, so says the ‘polling’.
The new message is to work in the public sector, only for four days condensed until that is too long, take 45 to 50 holidays/leave per year (then spend, spend because your pensions are protected), or get taken to the cleaners.
September 10, 2024
+1
September 9, 2024
Freedom of speech and the Common law. Habeas Corpus.
September 9, 2024
The right to trial by Jury (of your peers) for serious crimes
September 9, 2024
FTSE 100 stock market last 20 years total return 5.6% (circa double) after tax and inflation basically nothing! A lump of gold is circa 6 times up over the same period. Berkshire Hathaway about 7 times. Mainly due to the appalling & misdirected socialist government we have suffered for these years and before. Especially high taxes, over regulation restrictive planning and rip off energy.
September 10, 2024
The total shareholder return from the FTSE 10 over the past 20 years has been 279% (6.89% pa) and 83% over the past 10 years (12.89% pa). Gold 20 years ago today was proced at ÂŁ225/oz and it’s ÂŁ1,912/oz this morning. Ten years ago it was ÂŁ764/oz. Like all things it depends on which period you look at. I own both although gold is a small percentage of my portfolio. I view it as insurance, not a source of income.
September 9, 2024
âThe U.K. has been a leading force for free trade worldwide.â
We no longer believe in free trade. Even in the UK many markets are rigged, transport, schools, universities, energy, farming, housing, banking, social care, the NHS, employment laws⊠are all hugely rigged by unfair government taxation & regulation. About to get even worse under Stasi Starmer. Starmer and Labour even lie to us that Private School users get an unfair tax break through not paying VAT on fees. They actually will pay four times over. 1. In taxes for otherâs childrenâs schooling, 2, In tax and NI on the extra earning needed to pay the fees, then the fees and now VAT on top of the fees. They also lie that it will raise net money it will cost more than it raises another disincentive to hard work.
September 9, 2024
I missed off the rigging of media the BBC tax and Ofcom propaganda enforcement outfit and ministers like Neil OâBrien doing the same. The enforced lies on Covid Vaccines even for children, Masks, Covid, Lockdowns, Covid lies on wet market origins etc. which all did huge harms.
Tony Blair in a BBC interview with âwhat word of wisdom would you like to impart today âinterviewerâ lefty dope Amol Rajan said âI would prefer main stream media were more powerful as Social Media is a bit of a plagueâ. Blair the man who lied the nation into a pointless, hugely damaging, vastly expensive and losing war. Most damaging disinformation come from Government Tony as we see/saw with net zero, the Covid vaccines⊠Who decided what is misinformation Tony.
Remind me Tony did anything positive at all come out of the Blair/Brown years – I have yet to find any. David Starkey is very sound on this. Pointless damaing Wars , appalling and botched devolution, the supreme court, open door (generally low skilled immigration levels), the US extradition treaty, climate alarmism, anti-white male discrimination, HS2, no deterrent policing and justice, ever more EU red tape, failure to reform the dire NHS, failures in energy, the mad climate change act, the evil committee for climate changeâŠ
September 9, 2024
What annoys me, intensely, is that many of those, especially in the Media, are those whose relatives were only too pleased to be allowed to come and live here, often from war torn countries.
They have made a very good life for themselves here, but often dont have a good word to say about us.
Another thing, if we are such a rotten Country, why is the rest of the World trying to get here, often risking their lives to do so? They donât seem to have got the message.
September 9, 2024
Cheshire Girl +1
September 9, 2024
Neil Oliver article in the Spectator
A British state of mind – 29 November 2020
September 9, 2024
The UK’s rabid left have an aim of total control. First they would impoverish the individual financially so removing any sense of independence. They would emphasise this by making large swathes dependent on their state, ie. enhancing control.
They have then contrived to destroy high quality education. The residual only teaches what the left deems appropriate, however warped it might be.
The left then down plays and denigrates whatever from our past can genuinely make us proud, while emphasising anything we got wrong, using the ploy of judging the past by current norms. The aim being to destroy our pride and replace it with their own warped ideology.
The lefts motivation and end game is all written large in George Orwell’s 1984. The positive side is that through their unexpected large majority, due to the default of any opposition, they are well on the path to self destruction.
September 9, 2024
1. The country of the Common Law and Magna Carta
2. The country which developed THE international language
3. The country of Chaucer, William Shakespeare and Dickens (to name just 3)
4. The country which broke from the power of Rome and created the Church of England
5. The country of John Wycliff, William Tyndale and the King James Bible
6. The country which produced Stephenson, Newton, Darwin (to name just 3)
7. The country which developed the steam engine, television and the computer
8. The country whose whole history led to the development of the original human rights*, which it embedded in Europe after the worst tyranny in history (*not the politicised “rights” for minorities now in operation)
9. The country which gave up its Empire, did its best to embed democracy in its former colonies and created the Commonwealth of Nations – a voluntary membership organisation
10. The country, along with America, which the Globalists are desperate to destroy because they know the British people and the Americans are most likely to resist their tyrannical plans
September 9, 2024
Donna +1
September 9, 2024
@Donna +1
Our WEF Socialist cabal in Parliament have been fighting the people all through this century. They do not understand common law, let alone English Law or the Magna Carta and they certainly have never understood that is the people that have lent them their power. Its called the Great Reset and the HoC has signed up to that and they have that in spades now the 20% support of the country that put the Marxists in control
September 9, 2024
Well said Donna, I believe a lot of the criticism is down to jealousy!
As the one in the middle, I am extremely proud of my grandfather who I followed into Marine Engineering and the Merchant Navy.
My father with his work as a chemist in the clothing industry .
And finally my Son a holder of the George Cross.
The trash coming into our Great Country can never change my admiration of my families achievements in British life! But then I must be Far Right! and Proud of it!
September 9, 2024
English has more than 3 x the number of words of most other modern languages. We can be very precise. It reflects the intricate intellectual development of the British.
Thatâs why French is the language of diplomacy – it can mean anything either side want it to mean.
I think Churchill said the English language was our greatest gift to the world – more even than the Rule of Law – which sprang from the Assizes – based on Judeo-Christian laws – we gave much before 1217.
September 9, 2024
Donna:
Very well said! Beautifully put.
September 10, 2024
Donna: (2) Our language – increasingly being attacked too. Good piece by Celia Walden – DT 10/9 (Features suppt Page 7 ) Title: ‘ How exactly is a UN ban on the word ‘lumberjack’ going to fix the gender pay gap?’
Very briefly – ” What I would have paid to sit in on the ‘Guidelines on Inclusive Language’ meetings held by the World Intellectual Property Organisation ( W I P O ) prior to their crackdown on ‘gendered language’ ” ( Geneva based United Nations agency ) The talk is of problematic patriarchal connotations. Watch out for probs with terms such as lumberjack, brotherhood of man, forefathers, not forgetting midwife ( birth attendant…? ) and, emerging earlier this year in guidance from a well known bank, that the terms “guinea pig” and “headless chicken” presumably might be avoided / might be problematic ( could be trauma inducing to vegans…. ) She makes a very important point at the end with facts & statistics re women & girls really being problematic, all the while time is being spent on all of this xxxx!
September 9, 2024
The Conservative party had 14 years to expose and criminalise the existential threat of this ideological cancer driven by Marxist Labour’s client state, they chose to endorse it out of pure convenience. It seeks nothing less than the total replacement of this nation and its indigenous presence in all of its forms with a new, imported presence.
In fifty years time the UK will no longer exist as we know it. You can thank Cameron, May and Johnson for that, and its MPs who also have chosen to stay silent. Playing the criminal race card is the ultimate weapon of cultural war. The Tories had no defence to this. They could have told the criminal Left to FECK OFF, they didn’t
September 9, 2024
Dom +1
September 9, 2024
@DOM +1
So very true, I don’t think Cameron, May and Johnson along with Sunak were in any doubt of the direction they were creating Starmer has only put a Marxists twist on their destruction. It is those that run what used to be the Conservative Party with their left wing socialist WEF inspired candidate fixing that has empowered Marxist Labour. The one nationalists, the liberal democrat wing of the Uniparty are at comfortable working to Starmers goals after all its just their goals
September 9, 2024
I bet they knew back in 1832 that eventually the âdemocracyâ they imposed would destroy the country.
All has been sacrificed for party unity rather than the greater good.
And then there was one!
Just one!!
September 9, 2024
Well yes but the problems started well before that Heath, Wilson, Blair, Brown, Major, Cameron, May, Boris, Sunak… all huge disasters
September 9, 2024
I consider Scotland and Wales in particular will still exist. They have many speaking for them and identifying as Scottish and Welsh above Britain or the UK, but who promotes England in the same way?
The British/UK establishment intends to destroy England and the English. They will identify with Scotland and Wales, but to do this they wish to put England beneath. They dare not speak for the English, even if they wished to.
September 9, 2024
Don’t forget the NHS. Paid for out of our taxes and free at the point of use. To everyone; even some one who arrives by dinghy or in the back of a lorry, or flies in and presents themselves at hospital.
I once saw a documentary programme where a woman from the far-east flew in, went to hospital saying she had chest pain. Resulting in a triple by-pass funded by all of us. She was told there was a bill to be paid, but went back home without bothering.
Then there’s net zero; The UK is destroying it’s remaining industry and creating the most expensive energy anywhere in the world. Just to save <1% of global Co2 emissions.
How can anyone run down such a generous country? (unless despite living here you actually hate us)
September 9, 2024
Add to list: Sir Isaac Newton, Churchill, Oxford, Cambridge, the mini, the Beatles, Stonehenge, London, the London cockney, Dickens – A Christmas Carol, grammar schools, Eton, the London red bus, the London black cab, Magna Carta, Nelson, Cook, Lord of the Rings, Jeeves and Wooster, Wellington, Darwin, Handel, Spitfire, chocolate bar, electric motor, toothbrush, lighbulb, Jane Austen, Bath city, cream tea.
September 9, 2024
Menâs worsted wool suits and shirts and tie.
September 9, 2024
Starmer appears to share your admiration, Sir John, for the USA. One of his first acts on coming to power was to scrap the need for Parliament to debate and renew every 10 years the Mutual Defence Agreement with Washington. Locking us into the agreement means our dependence on the Americans for our nuclear deterrent is now permanent. Any notion of parliamentary responsibility for Britainâs foreign and defence policies has now gone.
September 9, 2024
These are indeed great things we should all be proud of. It might be related to number 5, but I would add our reputation for fairness (as well as playing by the rules).
I have often pondered why Socialists are not proud to be British. They duplicitously accept all the advantages of being born British – a relatively rich and safe country which has a pleasant, kind and intelligent culture yet they want to find, exaggerate or invent every disadvantage possible to demonise it.
I think I have worked out why they are the way they are. I think Socialists are actually selfish people. They want something provided to them instead of going out there and earning it, inventing it, creating it or discovering it. What Socialists should actually do is have far more self-belief and self-confidence and do these things instead of wallowing in a selfish and and what is often a spiteful predicament. They will almost always surprise themselves if they tried hard and tried hard again if necessary.
We are all responsible for our decisions and actions in life but we should all be proud we live in a country of second chances and opportunities at prosperity. Socialist scorn is completely misplaced and they should stop knocking Britain immediately.
September 9, 2024
Did put the envy-of-the-world NHS in the top ten John ? Tut tut – Starmer’s internet police will be calling.
September 9, 2024
As well as the past, we should be proclaiming some truths about the present, too.
At one level we are one of the least racist, mysoginistic and most religiously tolerant countries on the planet. Anyone who has travelled widely will recognise this (look at ethnic tensions in South Asia for example).
Yet this pluralistic attitude has morphed into a perverse extreme when it comes to our ruling class. They allow foreign economic migrants to break our laws by entering our country illegally. They take money from the indigenous population to house and feed the incomers. By contrast they impose the law harshly on any dissenting voices amongst the resident population such that the country is no longer a benign democracy.
September 9, 2024
Yes Sir John I am sick to death of it. And very angry that it is allowed. I saw very little condemnation at the latest nonsense regarding the Albert memorial. The Proms is always getting it in the neck. Once again it is appeasement of BLM, the failure to confront those that scream racist at every tu, the indoctrination of our youth in schools and universities. British history is taught as though we are the bad people of the world. Etc with nobody putting them right. Good grief we even had our police and our current PM bending the knee. We also had a primary school that during an assembly made the white children turn to a black child and apologise to them.
Just know, that you can like everything to our colonial past whether that be for the good or bad and that toppling statues, removing pictures, changing street names and the rest that is going on will not stop until our past has been completely erased and starts when the Windrush arrived to âsaveâ us.
As for reparations. I fail to understand why I, who has never owned a slave, who wasnât born with a silver spoon in my mouth, should pay money to people who have never been slaves.
One day soon the statue of Victoria outside Buckingham Palace will be the target I mean one only has to be offended.
September 9, 2024
I agree, the misuse of History is prevalent for some misguided political purposes. Yes there is much in our British history to be proud of though I don’t take any credit for that ! There are also some things to ashamed of, though I donât take any responsibility for that either. None the less, I am proud that we, the British have a long and recorded history but dismiss its use for political ends.
September 9, 2024
Cornwall, the Yorkshire Dales, James Herriot, film, David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplain, Lawrence of Arabia, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, British humour, cup of tea, Lancaster Bomber, Where Eagle’s Dare film, prison escapes WW2, Mary Poppins, 303 road, St Paul’s Cathedral.
September 9, 2024
I agree with all the items on your list.
But I think it misses the point. You see, those items on the list are all âways weâre bestâ. But what about, say, Albanians? Are they proud of their country? I expect they are. Theyâre proud of the particular aspects of their country that make them Albanian. It doesnât matter that these particulars donât make them better than anyone else.
Now weâre at a disadvantage there. So much of our particular stuff has gone global. Did you know the suit is an English invention? So much for not having a national dress. The same is true for industrialisation, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, etc.
But particular things might include our sense of humour (shared with the Irish and some ex-colonies but not with lots of others) – and it doesnât matter if other donât find us funny, what matters is that we do – our royal family, our landscape – I love the Lake District, all our little villages, our high streets and so on. The fact that most of our counties and towns are 1000 years old, and you can find evidence of that age if you go looking. I find it fascinating.
Thatâs my contribution any way.
September 9, 2024
Where oh were is Michael Faraday in all these comments ? Possibly he greatest Englishman after Shakespeare and Churchill
September 9, 2024
Cromwell is the greatest ever Englishman. He is the only man to have refused the Throne, he was tested intellectually, spiritually and physically. He answered all questions. He was a Monarchist with such a foul Monarch, he was a Parliamentarian with such a foul Parliament – surely we understand this?
September 9, 2024
Interesting that the “official view” of British culture – what makes this country great – is now little more than “tolerance and a sense of fair play”, along with that uncopied envy of the the world, the NHS. That’s all the BBC, other mainstream media, and the current government can bring themselves to say about it. All else is “problematic”.
And if you think about it, if you wanted millions of people from other countries to come here and be passively accepted by the indigenous population, that’s precisely the view you’d propagate, isn’t it?
September 9, 2024
And let’s not forget the abolition of the slave trade, using a fleet of ships, the West Africa Squadron, at a time when we couldn’t really afford it.
September 9, 2024
We were fighting Napoleon at the time. But we thought putting down slavery was so importent that we managed that too.
What other nation can compare?
September 9, 2024
Hi sir John
The Indian shop worker in my local shop
describes this country as
The mother country
September 9, 2024
Oh yes, extremely so!
They are illogical and mostly misinformed, seeking the wrong targets for vague reasons. You don’t see them attacking Middle Eastern countries for their use of slaves, nor the fact that slaving originated there and is still going on.
To add to the list of attributes, I’d say the British were innovative, with a real work ethic that produces good effects. We pioneered the idea of freedom of speech, unfortunately now in rapid decline, but the concept was well established here.
In a balanced world the UK would normally come out on top. The only thing stopping our success now is a political establishment that wants to change our culture and return us to a new kind of Dark Age.
September 9, 2024
One of the most recent great things we have done is to leave the EU, and stop paying their wasteful membership fee. Other previously-free nations entangled in the stricture of EU legislate-like-mad regulations can see the freedom available to us and be inspired by their opportunity to be free themselves.
September 9, 2024
Sir John
All good and correct. That begs the Question why have our Political Class tried to deny our achievements then push agendas to ensure we canât get ahead, create wealth and hove the money to fund a good future for everyone.
It appears to have started with Blair, then Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak and now Starmer all working to a common agenda â destruction of Society, Democracy and keeping up the fight with the Citizens of this Country that empowered and paid them. Not one of them with the common decency that they have been shown by the Peoples of these lands.
September 9, 2024
Yesterday in the media we had 2 tier Kier Starmer confirming that that those that oppose him are in his eyes âextreme right terroristâ
He also reminded everyone that there is a âÂŁ22billion Black Holeâ and to plug that he will priorities
Spending –
11.4 billion to help poor countries reach Net Zero
7.0 billion to process and accommodate illegal migrants
5.5 billion public sector pay award with no productivity gain
8.5 billion for new Windmills for Milliband which will increase our electricity costs
Whoâs black hole, and were is the OBR over-site?
To claw back his additional expenditure, he will save ÂŁ1.5billion by removing payments to pensioners who canât respond and achieve replacement income as can the rest of the Country. He has to be nasty to pensioners as they are the minority, and will it make him look like a tough ruler. He knows they wont take to the streets, anyway most pensionerâs a right wing zealotâs he rather they were dead and buried.
This Century has seen the biggest assault of democracy, probably in our history – and they still don’t get it!
September 9, 2024
A Civil Servant has confirmed that Departments were required to âoverspendâ and their overspend was not monitored (by the OBR?) so there is a debt previously unquantified. Well when you donât know how many boats are going to arrive you canât budget.
However Starmer has spent a further ÂŁ25 billion on increased state wages. Starmer canât âtax the top1%â because that would include train drivers! So he goes for the old and poor who canât withdraw their Labour.
September 9, 2024
I don’t often agree with you but, well said.
September 9, 2024
Donât forget the suffering of the British people by the Norman Conquest which we are still paying for today. They stole our land with much of it still in the hands of their descendants today. It seems to me lefties have very selective causes based only on skin colour. No doubt this government will be authorising reparations for the slave trade as a priority.
September 9, 2024
Is King Charles going to hand back his Coronation crown that was given to the “Royal” family by a renown slave trader…
I hardly think so…
September 9, 2024
I never hear us complain that we were attacked, and sometimes subject to rape and pillage, by the Romans, Scandinavians, French, Spanish. I wish to have the present leaders of those countries apologise and offer financial restitution.
September 9, 2024
Preparatory column for subsequent astroturfing by Ch.Moore et al. and Restore Trust?
September 9, 2024
Dear Mr. Redwood,
I certainly am and I am equally fed up with a particular right-wing party, in power for 14 years, that failed to challenge this insidious and poisonous ideology from permeating every aspect of our lives and institutions. Indeed, one could say this party is one of the institutions taken over by the new left-wing orthodoxy judging by how they governed during their time in office.
So successful has this takeover been that people on the right are afraid to give voice to their opinions lest they be deemed socially unacceptable or far-right. Some people wishing to vote for right-wing parties are known to keep their counsel when asked about their voting intentions so intimidated have they become. Shy Tories I believe they are called.
To dwell on the situation is quite depressing. Just who is going to start the fightback?
September 9, 2024
People on here often refer to a cabal known as âthe globalistsâ. Who are they? How are they organised? What is their stated aim?
September 9, 2024
I have wondered this, too, Mike. I’ve read they are people who want open borders everywhere and no sovereign nations.
I also wonder whether Agenda 2030 is a real thing or not; people say it is to reach the globalists’ goals, but who puts the globalists in charge, how are they elected, and how can they be removed (in the words of Tony Benn)?
September 9, 2024
The transnational usurocracy and their networked supporting cast-NATO,CIA,MI6,Chatham House,Council on Foreign Relations,Trilateral Commission,etc.
Paul Warburg of the famous banking dynasty:
“We shall have world government whether we like it or not.The only question is whether world government will be achieved by conquest or consent.”
The vast majority of you probably still think the Cold War was about capitalism vs communism (just as now they want you to think Cold War II is about democracy vs autocracy);wrong!-they were/are about the imposition of monopoly capital-a single system.If you dig into the now open government files from the end of WWII you will see the cold war was about making the Soviet Union “bend to our will”-it had refused to get involved in the proposed new order of Bretton Woods,IMF,World Bank,etc decrying them as “branches of Wall Street”.In that they were absolutely correct!
September 9, 2024
The DT’s Tim Stanley has today written an article on this very issue. The racist Left’s war against all things indigenous is so sinister, so Maoist, so evil.
I despair that the Tories when in government did not confront and expose this evil that is now being rolled out by the extremists at the NEU and other leftist activist groups like Labour’s HNH.
And this King. Well, he needs to wake up and realise that this politics also aims to replace his family with a republic. To say Charles is naive is stating the bleeding obvious
September 9, 2024
Telegraph today: â NHS progress âin decline for first time in 50 yearsâ.
Isnât it incredible that after only two months of Labour government the NHS situation (which had been so perfect during the past 14 years of Conservative governments) could have deteriorated so much and so rapidly?
September 9, 2024
Life expectancy has declined due to Covid, the net harm vaccines, delays in NHS treatments and ambulances, cold houses… So will the pension age now go down a bit as that was the excuse they used for putting it up?
4000 thousands pensioners could die if winter fuel payments are cut, according to Labour’s own research! I think they mean die earlier (and is this PA?)!
So how many will rip off unreliable renewables and mad Milibands net zero lunacy kill off early? 40,000 100,000.
September 9, 2024
What do you think caused all those new heart problems after 20 years of progress, Hefner? I appreciate that this sudden increase in patients is causing problems with rapid treatment, so waiting lists are growing after cases increase from 2020 onwards. Progress made on Strokes has also reversed the people I know having Strokes in the last four years are all non-smokers.
I’d like to see the waiting times broken down per hospital A&E and trust compared against trust. NHS treatment shouldn’t depend on your postcode.
The NHS is broken in Wales and Manchester, both of which devolved to Labour a long while ago. We need proper comparative statistics on the successful hospitals and trusts.
September 9, 2024
One should add several more:
-Britain has disproportionately been home to the most significant thinkers in world history such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and many more and some others came to live or work in Britain
– Two of the main Universities in the world, Oxford and Cambridge are British
– London has been the leading and often innovative financial centre in the world
– English has become the most important language in the world
-Factually the British Empire (perhaps the most benevolent major empire) was the biggest ever empire in the world.
September 9, 2024
Poll: Starmer âwipes the floorâ with Tory leadership hopefuls on who would be best PM
Sir Keir Starmer âwipes the floorâ with all five Tory leadership hopefuls on the question of who would be the best prime minister, according to a new Savanta poll.
The results were as follows:
Cleverly (23%), Starmer (47%), Don’t Know (30%)
Tugendhat (22%), Starmer (47%), Don’t Know (31%)
Jenrick (20%), Starmer (48%), Don’t Know (32%)
Badenoch (20%), Starmer (49%), Don’t Know (32%)
Stride (16%), Starmer (48%), Don’t Know (36%)
I am surprised the did that well. They lost an 80 seat majority to Starmer, seemingly deliberately if not maliciously. We need to find a Conservative that can sort out those that run the faux Conservative Party. Sometime we have to acknowledge the Country is worth fighting for, it is the Party at large around the Country that needs to take the party back. The Country is Conservative the party and those running a party under that banner in Parliament are not. Someone in the wider country has to bang heads together, continuity with those that have collectively failed the Country is not the answer.
September 9, 2024
The MPs that now form the rump of the Tory party are, almost to a person, net zero, big state, high immigration and QUANGO enthusiasts. The Tory Party membership has allowed this to happen. Anyone who is a Tory Party member who is bothered by the state of our politics should join their local branch of Reform and work to get Reform MPs elected. The Tory Party, as a conservative party, is no more.
September 10, 2024
@Mike Wilson – they are not Conservatives. Why would they be seeking to select a leader that was part of the collective responsibility cabal of failure that lost an 80 seat majority?
September 9, 2024
Why no mention of our huge contribution to science and manufacturing ?
We were pioneers in all branches of science from Charles Darwin to Rutherford. Then there was our unique development of the industrial revolution where we were ahead of every other country on the planet.
To this we should give a special place to the Royal Navy for exploration and bringing civilisation to every corner of the world.
Forget Shakespear, these are our greatest contributions to the World Order.
September 9, 2024
You mentioning the RN reminded me that we also invented the mirror deck landing system and angled deck aircraft carriers – each soon copied by the US Navy and others…
September 9, 2024
âAre you as fed up as I am with left wing parties and many in the media constantly running down our past?â
This is a deliberate tactic used by the fifth column Communists in our Parliament, Civil Service, institutions and MSM to demoralise and weaken the nation and is coupled with mass immigration to end cohesiveness and promote cultural and moral confusion plus of course the sabotaging of our energy and economy with Net Zero.
Our greatest gift to mankind was the Industrial Revolution which has lifted those who have applied it out of grinding poverty thus saving billions of lives. Even the Chinese Maoists have embraced it. But thatâs not the view of our own elites as evidenced by PM Johnson who vilified the UK by proclaiming to the World at the UN 22/09/2021 :
âWe were the first to send the great puffs of acrid smoke to the heavens on a scale to derange the natural orderâ.
And who then hatched the unilateral Net Zero Strategy, a program for de-industrialisation and national suicide.
September 9, 2024
I agree with you, I often wonder whether the people who play down our history have ever travelled the world like I have. When you go to such countries as India , people I have talked to say how we helped develop the country by constructing roads, railways and democracy. This is just one example of the good we have helped many countries.
September 9, 2024
Sir John, there are many achievements you have not listed that the UK championed that changed the world.
One of the most pertinent being the banning of slavery and the use of our world wide naval forces to impose that ban. We were the first empire in history to do so. We are still working hard to try and get many parts of the world to live up to that ban slavery initiative.
September 9, 2024
This topic is bang on trend right now. From Hefner in the Telegraph to Malik in the Guardian.
Malik writes today: “A Britain proud of its present and realistic about its past is taking shape: with the angry right trailing behind”.
Surveys can say anything the left wants to prove. Who on this blog gets regular surveys? I’ve never completed one; in fact, no one I know has ever completed one. I often ask them.
“The new Britain that is emerging is one that has come about organically and over time, but it is also one that has been dragged there.” She says…”English rightwing politicians and the media focus so hectically on âwokeâ assaults on British heritage and history…..the country is leaving them behind”.
Who is Nesrine Malik, I thought? – Born in the Sudan, raised in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She is now based in London after coming here to do her post-grad. I wonder about journalists that write so often on these topics about Britain [Empire, Immigration, Asylum, Industrial Action, Colonialism, Islamophobia, The far right] and her hatred of the ‘right’ in Britain (and America); she calls this ‘her’ country but feels it is a ‘depressing’ place and people are ‘disenfranchised’. Try to find positive articles about our history that she writes, I wasn’t successful.
I wonder, with people like Nesrine, how much money she arrived in the UK with? How did she afford to live in London? That she did doesn’t seem to impress her. There are thousands, if not millions, of British kids who can’t afford to make that move, many with post-grad degrees, yet she frequently writes that we are an unfair, unbalanced Country.
“With the likes of Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel leading the pack, what will face Labour in opposition is a sort of rattling gutter politics.” Isn’t this journalist rattling with prejudice of her own? To a Country that happily took her in, has provided good work and she ‘chose’ yes ‘chose’ to come to.
September 10, 2024
Nesrine Malik wrote about her own country: “[It] always struck me as sleepy and dark â power cuts were frequent and the oppressive heat infused everything with a sticky torpor.” She doesn’t like the country of her birth, wants to adopt this country as ‘hers’, but still insists on telling us what is wrong with it. I lived abroad for ten years, but I don’t think I’d have done very well if I’d broadcast my views on their societies and political systems. So why does this work in Britain?
September 10, 2024
I don’t understand the desire to move to another Country, especially if you despise that Country, in this case, the UK and half the people in it. Then, try to exert influence through the free media in that country to change it to suit your politics better when you didn’t like the country you were born in either.
The way the left tries to cancel people who associate with people on the right is vicious as well; Taylor Swift was in the crosshairs today of one of Malik’s colleagues on the Guardian because she dared to hug a woman who said she will vote for Donald Trump! “Is Taylor Swift a Secret Trump Supporter?” Mahdawi, who is based in the USA, wants to know – Dolly Parton once said she keeps out of politics because she doesn’t want to upset one-half of her fans. Why shouldn’t Swift be allowed to be friendly with people left or right?
September 11, 2024
Ah, I see; it works. Swift has swiftly come out to back Harris in the Presidential elections, so the media pressure works.
The issue is, though, that if you are on the left of politics, there is nothing wrong with being friends with people on the right and visa versa; something is going very wrong in politics of the 2000’s with this, the other side are all scum, the people on the other side are trying to kill old people – it needs to stop, there has got to be a better way.
September 9, 2024
Unfortunately, despite our being pathfinders, many of our competitors have stolen a march on us as we have not followed in the footsteps of our pioneering forebears. The power loom which launched the industrial revolution preceded by the world’s first iron frame building and shortly followed by the world’s first large span iron bridge. Where is our machine tool industry now? Smashed by Thatcher’s Chancellor, the unbalanced obsessive, Geoffrey Howe. Despite the replacement of metal frames enabling tall buildings to be constructed without flying buttresses, the Tories have been covering our erstwhile green and pleasant land with nasty little boxes.
What went wrong? Universal suffrage was instituted on the basis of First Past the Post which means that although every adult gets a vote, two thirds of those votes have no effect on political outcomes and leave us with political control in the hands of those who support with cash the major political parties, the latter of which lie that that their ‘benefactors’ do not demand or receive their pound of flesh.
September 9, 2024
Think of all the games that come from Britain
football, tennis, golf, rugby, cricket, boxing, hockey, snooker, basketball, table tennis etc etc.
September 9, 2024
Many Europeans when taking a pot shot at Britain condemn us for having had an empire, but they forget that most European countries had or wanted an empire of one sort or another.
They are simply jealous that we in the end had the biggest and best empire ever.
September 9, 2024
+1 they are especially jealous that we could afford it – Empires are costly! Moreover having given them all independence they cling on in the Commonwealth.
I have not noticed The Congo maintaining ties with Belgium – but then we all went to cut all ties with Belgium!
Germany has today closed it borders! If they can why canât we?
September 10, 2024
The Congo was originally a personal possession of King Leopold,rather than the Belgian state,and it’s notorious exploitation was conducted by a multi-national cast of chancers,including Stanley of Livingston fame.
September 10, 2024
I am sorry for stating the well known and obvious but it must be said repeatedly. No-one in authority wants to close our borders. They permanently lie about it.They wish us to be in practice dominated by an imported culture and religion. They think we must and give up defending ourselves and decent ways which have been adopted elsewhere.
And those who don’t want it dare not say anything.
1. They are in danger of arrest and conviction or having their employment destroyed.
2. They are in imminent danger of physical attack and no defence given to them by the police or others, as the policy of authority.
September 9, 2024
What is the point of the Conservative Party?
https://conservativehome.com/2024/09/06/christopher-howarth-what-is-the-point-of-the-conservative-party/
This Guy has valid points, but he is talking to the hand when it comes the parliamentary shower, those that organise it and those that pretend to be a part of it and that is the problem.
Sir John talking about lost values, the refusal is to see how great a Nation we can be and outside of metro London is, to me this demonstrates that getting back to purpose and a reasoning with a UK agenda and not a Socialist WEF agenda as is all what it is required. 14 years of failure is simply down to the refusal to serve those that empower and pay, the pursuit of what after all of foreign agendas and diktats, to master that are not part of the electorate. Foreign sourced policies that are foreign to the UK are pursued by those that become self-indulgent nobodyâs.
A generation have lost purpose, are being trashed on extremist ideology of the left and are not being released to reach potential â that is the punishment the UK Parliament is handing out
September 9, 2024
We’ll never achieve anything better here until we change the medieval way we look at things – there’s too much effort paid to the past without looking to the future – the past is all ok for academics and the political set but for business and commerce to succeed we need growth and for growth we need trading partners? So then for a start let the barometer for success be the amount of food banks we can eliminate – am sure a suitable graph can be drawn up
September 9, 2024
Too right! We have to be proud of and uphold the United Kingdom.
September 9, 2024
Slightly off topic: have you seen the Report commissioned by the EU from Draghi? It encapsulates exactly why the British were like fish out of water within the EU:
An existential challenge for the EU”
Former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi today presents a major report on the future of Europe, which he spent a year preparing for the European Commission.
His goal is to develop a strategy to “pull the EU out of a pit of low productivity and weak growth as it lags behind the US and China,” Politico writes.
Draghi concluded that Europe’s economic problems are rooted in the cost of energy for industry – electricity is 158% more expensive than in the US, and natural gas is 345% more expensive.
“The era of open global trade governed by multilateral institutions appears to be ending,” Draghi said.
He estimates that the EU needs unprecedented levels of investment, more than twice the size of the post-war Marshall Plan. Draghi proposes that the EU issue new common debt to finance its industrial and defense needs.
Draghi also states that the US is no longer ready to be a “security umbrella” for Europe, and the EU is not yet able to defend itself, the media notes.
He sees an opportunity for the EU in the future to export green technologies and also modernise production with AI.
September 10, 2024
The always incisive comment from the Sirius Report this morning:
“What could possibly go wrong?
Draghi would like to see securitization in EU financial markets to be given a new lease of life.
Essentially this is about pooling and packaging “loans” into securities.
Remember 2008.
This would be disastrous.”
September 9, 2024
Iâm proud of all the things weâve built and invented over the centuries right up till 1974 âŠIâm especially proud of our Anglo-Saxon traditions & customs which are sadly in decline due to political wokeness
September 9, 2024
I am interested you do not include the National Health Service in your paragraph 5!
September 9, 2024
Britain is importing record amounts of electricity from abroad at a cost of ÂŁ250m a month following the closure of coal-fired and nuclear power stations, new analysis shows.
Some 20pc of the gridâs power needs were met through interconnectors with neighbouring countries during the second quarter of this year.
The amount of power imported from abroad was double the volume generated by wind and solar farms
Then we have near 30% foreign owned UK Taxpayer subsidised wind.
UK power is moving towards being majority owned and controlled by the whims of foreign governments we can’t vote for. All this energy is at a premium price, and makes the UK an expensive place when compared to all our competitors. Sending taxpayer money out of the Country along with the capability create the earnings to tax is called decline.
September 9, 2024
Contemplating point 3, of which I am immensely proud: this is what the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said today, he condemned the use of Nazi symbols by the Ukrainian military:
“We all talk about fascism, Nazism, and at the same time we silently tolerate the fact that there are units running around in Ukraine that have a very clear label associated with movements that we consider dangerous and banned today.”
September 9, 2024
55 illegal economic /criminals arrived in the UK yesterday from the safe country of France âŠ..Iâm proud that the people adopt the principals of âRule of Lawâ; Iâm ashamed that our government allows immigrants into our country without visas …I’m ashamed that our government hasn’t the courage to send them back to France
September 9, 2024
my maternal grandfather was kio in France(ww1) before my mother was born.My maternal step-grandad
was gravely wounded.Come ww2 my dad was kia France 1944 just a couple of months before I
was producedMy stepdad was gravely wounded in Burma.For sure they never questioned the
why’s and the wherefore’s .They answered the call.
They represent what makes this country worth singing about.NOT the unmentionables that
fetch up in the Commons and Lords.
September 11, 2024
And your 10 does not include the UK court decision in 1772 that a slave could not be taken Jamaica for sale. In summary, Lord Mansfield decided that slavery was not supported by UK Common Law. In 1833 the Slavery Abition Act was passed and the UK committed to stop the Transatlantic and Indian Slave Trade.
September 13, 2024
All well and good but couldn’t you find anything that we have helped in the natural world sphere? Some of us love other species as much as humans, sometimes more, so it would be nice for you to do a list of our help in this area. I would just like to know what we have done for other species as well as for our own. Thanks.